Gloabl technology giant Alcatel-Lucent is set to upgrade the EASSy submarine cable system, one of the largest and most modern systems serving Africa, with the deployment of the latest 100 gigabit-per-second (Gbit/s) technology.

Chris Wood, Chairman of the EASSy Management Committee (image: EASSy)

Alcatel-Lucent‘s 100G technology will enable the system to ultimately carry capacity in excess of 10Tbit/s, further complementing its ability to carry high volumes of data capacity on the EASSy system, which runs 10,000km from South Africa to Sudan, in support of the continued explosion of data traffic in Africa.

Alcatel-Lucent will leverage its unmatched experience of deployments around Africa to provide this upgrade within EASSy’s requested timeframe.

Chris Wood, Chairman of the EASSy Management Committee said: “Since EASSy entered service in 2010, we have seen enormous growth in demand for capacity on the system, reflecting the service quality and reliability that we have been able to offer. This upgrade will add an additional 400Gbps of capacity throughout the system, using Alcatel-Lucent’s advanced coherent 100Gbit/s technology, and enables us to take a further step in offering our customers the ultra-broadband capacity needed for innovative services and applications.”

The company also recently announced trial speeds of up to 1.4Tb/s with a record spectral efficiency of 5.7 bits per second per Hertz (b/s/Hz) on an existing core fiber connection. This is believed to be the fastest speed ever achieved in commercial grade hardware in a real-world environment and is equivalent to transmitting 44 HD films in a single second.

The field trial, conducted over an existing fiber link between the BT Tower in London and BT’s Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk, used a new ‘flexible grid’ infrastructure (Flexgrid) to vary the gaps between transmission channels, usually set at 50Gigahertz (GHz).

By increasing the density of channels on the fiber, this approach achieved up to 42.5 percent greater data transmission efficiency compared to today’s standard networks.

EASSy is owned and operated by a group of 17 African and international shareholders – all telecommunications operators and service providers.